MONKEY: Journey To The West
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
London
… so this Buddhist monk goes into the pizza house, and Counter Guy asks him what he wants on his pizza. The monk says, ‘Make me one with everything.’
Which is pretty much what composer Damon Albarn and designer Jamie Hewlett, in collaboration with Chen Shi-Zeng, the New York-based Chinese expat writer/director who originated the project, have dished up in their extravaganzoid stage adaptation of China’s favourite folk-tale, which those Gorillaz boys first encountered in the form of a beloved 1970s kids’ TV show. Based on a 16th-century novel by Wu Ch’eng-en, itself derived from a real journey undertaken by a Chinese monk in the 7th cenury to retrieve sacred Buddhist manuscripts from a temple in India (the ‘west’ of the title), Monkey calls on the stupendous talents of a small army of dancers, acrobats, contortionists and martial artists – all topped off with a chittering, capering, crotch-scratching bravura performance by Fei Yang in the trickster-hero title role ¬– to scratch-mix opera, ballet, circus and panto into something that runs a 12” single short of two hours and keeps you happily dazzled for most of it.
Though Monkey is a one-acter which runs as a single continuous spectacle, the story effectively splits into two halves. The first tells the origin of Monkey himself, magically hatched from a stone egg, and assuming leadership of all mortal monkeys before aspiring to immortality, mastering magic, arming himself with mystical weapons stolen, tricked and bullied from other realms (including, in one of Hewlett and Chen’s most hallucinatorily inspired staging coups),an exquisitely realised undersea kingdom) before dubbing himself ‘Great Sage, Equal To Heaven’ and finally being punished for his hubris by being imprisoned for 500 years beneath the palm of the Buddha.
Finally he receives his shot at redemption by bodyguarding twittery young monk Tripitaka on his quest to the West to retrieve the manuscripts. Along the way, they encounter an assoretment of characters, all denizens of heaven who’ve been kicked down the karmic ladder for various transgressions, who join their quest and aid them in facing the various dangers and deceptions which block their path.
Though one of these characters, Pigsy, reincarnated as a you-guessed, is far less entertaining than the amount of stage-time allotted to him by his creators would seem to suggest, and the ending is so narratively weak that you spend more time admiring the gorgeous set than revelling in closure, it all works splendidly. The projected Hewlett animations which link the early scenes are so stunning that you start missing them when you reach the ‘quest’ section of the saga and the scenes begin to flow into each other, the physical feats routinely performed by the cast – including jaw-stopping wire-work and a few contortions that make you ouch just to watch them – are rarely less than riveting, and Albarn’s music – more post-millennial globalised Chinoiserie than Chinese – is pleasingly eclectic, though unless your Mandarin is considerably better than mine, you’ll have to keep at least half an eye on the sur-titles projected over the stage and risk missing some delightful design coup or physical marvel.
Though it might, on the surface, seem to be a propaganda piece which attempts to do for Buddhism what The Exorcist did for Catholicism or Superfly for cocaine, the original contained much political satire, depicting a Heaven as riven by rivalry and bureaucracy as the Chinese court of the time.
Well done, all y’all. It seems like a very long time ago indeed that Hewlett was chronicling a post-apocalyptic kangaroo-shagging riot grrl and Albarn was in a pop group with the guy who writes about cheese in The Independent and a sad bloke who wants to be a Labour councillor.
… so the monk collects his pizza and pays with a twenty-pound note. Five minutes later he asks for his change. Counter Guy tells him, ‘Change must come from within.’
Word, 2008
